Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, September 29, 2009

By Marilyn French

Whether we like it or not, writers are the sum total of our parts (and the sum total of our sales figures, but that's another, far more sordid story). As readers, we follow our favorite authors' literary and personal evolutions as attentively as we track the twists and turns of their narratives.

But it's not just a writer's words (or sales figures) that belong on her permanent record. It's also her impact on her times, and on how they will be remembered and understood. Which is why it's impossible, for this reviewer at least, to review "The Love Children" without taking into account the considerable dents that Marilyn French knocked into the sturdy fenders of misogyny during the 79 years of her life.

Born in 1929, French earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1972 and went on to publish 15 books of fiction and nonfiction before she died of heart failure in May. She's best known for her 1977 novel, "The Women's Room," her portrait of the feminist movement of that era as reflected in the life of a recently divorced female grad student and her compatriots.

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"The Women's Room" sold more than 20 million copies, was translated into 20 languages and earned eternal notoriety for its author, to whom the book's most sensational quote was falsely attributed. "All men are rapists, and that's all they are," was actually uttered not by French, but by one of her characters. And yes, there is a difference: Imagine a world in which every novelist is held accountable for everything that every one of her characters thinks, says and does.

I'm loath to speak ill of the dead, or to contribute to the denigration of French's work. (As her New York Times obit put it, "In recent years Ms. French struggled to get published, partly because of the gains in women's rights she had helped bring about.") That said; props and kudos offered, I beg to disagree with Gloria Steinem's blurb about "The Love Children," which she calls "The perfect parallel to 'The Women's Room.' " I see "The Love Children," rather, as a highly imperfect sequel.

Written 30 years after her biggest seller, "The Love Children" reprises the same theme - the interplay of political and personal tumult in the lives of American women in the 1960s and 1970s - albeit from a greater distance and a longer view. But the similarities in content, style and point of view between French's first novel and her last made this reader feel that she was peering through the scratched lens of an antiquated microscope, only to find there a specimen previously exhumed.

The Love Child in question is Jess Leighton, a teenager when we meet her in Cambridge, Mass., in the 1960s. If Jess has anything to add to our understanding of the women of Woodstock Nation, French doesn't include it here. "We thought that we were a miracle generation," Jess reflects. "We were convinced that if the people of the world took drugs instead of alcohol, and preferred peace to war, violence would disappear in a haze of well-being ...We were incredulous that anyone on earth would deny the truth of our ideas."

And when Jess and her best friend join a commune called Pax: "Almost everyone at Pax hated the government. Some of them even thought it was okay to attack government installations, for example, nuclear bases ... At the end of January, before all the troops came home from Vietnam, the Watergate burglars were convicted, and by that summer, the hearings had started. This caused an uproar in the commune, because most of us felt we absolutely had to have a television set to watch the proceedings."

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A far more brilliant theoretician and activist than novelist, French deserves posthumous kudos - and readers - for her contributions to sexual equality. One only wishes that in this, her final fictional word on the subject, she'd done as a novelist what she spent her life exhorting girls and women to do: take important risks, examine every seemingly immutable notion from every possible angle, and strike out for the innovative and untested, instead of retreating to the safety of the known.

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